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Why the Orbán Era will end (unless something really weird happens)
Hungary has parliamentary elections tomorrow, and the polls suggest that Orbán is likely to lose after 16 years of supermajorities. You can find plenty coverage of this on your favorite new sources, but as a Hungarian I see those often miss the point. This result, a possible landslide unseating Orbán should not be interpreted as a Hungarian win for the culture war side that opposes Orban in the US or Western Europe, though I predict it will be seen through those lens in international media.
(I've been waiting for a thread on the Hungarian election, but I haven't seen any, so I'll just spill my thoughts anyway. I was too lazy to find English article links for all these topics as they are many, but I can answer with some, if interested.)
The main opposition party is a heterogeneous protest block, formed 2 years ago around a former member of Orbán's party, and this block is united around issues that have little visibility outside Hungary. It would be a mistake to project the western EU / US culture war onto this race. It has been a very intense campaign with many twists and turns that summaries reaching abroad can't fully reflect.
The election is all about a fight of narratives. The narrative of Orbán's Fidesz party has crystallized all around Ukraine, Zelensky, and Brussels. That Brussels will send the Hungarians' money to Ukraine to finance the war, that Brussels will even push Hungary to send soldiers to die in Ukraine, that losing access to Russian energy will make energy prices high, and only Orbán can protect us from this. There has been very little talk about US-style culture wars in this narrative, gender, immigration, woke, etc. in the last 6 months or so. It has been all about war and Ukraine and Zelensky. Orbán phrased what's at stake as follows "We must choose who will form a government, me or Zelensky. I humbly recommend myself". I can attest that this has resonated with many low-information voters who don't follow politics or only catch glimpses of news. Many, especially older people are afraid that their kids and grandkids will go die in Ukraine if Orbán loses. Billboards and public television pushes 24/7 that there will be war and only Orbán can keep us out of it.
Meanwhile the narrative of the opposition Tisza party has been about Fidesz's and Orbán's corruption, arrogance, luxury lifestyle of oligarchs, Russian interference and spies, the crumbling healthcare system, scandals about the treatment of children in several children's homes and their political coverups, and Orbán turning even the intelligence services against opposition civilians. But more than the topics themselves the story itself had a folktale-like narrative arc.
It all started with the 2024 pardon scandal, in which it came to light that the vice principal of a children's home, who helped cover up sexual abuse against children by the principal, had received a presidential pardon and got released from prison, almost a year earlier than this becoming public (the pardon was given on the occasion of the papal visit of 2023, a traditional occasion for some presidential pardons). This led to a massive uproar and large demonstrations. The president, a former Orbán minister, had to resign, and along with her also the justice minister, because she also had to sign the pardon. (It turned out it was through some personal and family ties of the vice principal to the Calvinist Reformed Church, whose leader was a former Orbán minister and the president's mentor and informal advisor - Orbán is also a Calvinist by the way).
Amidst this outrage, still in 2024, Péter Magyar (who is today leader of the opposition), came to the scene, being the ex-husband of the recently resigned justice minister. He himself was a member of Orbán's party, and wrote a Facebook post against the whole Orbán system, from the position of the insider who has had enough. By then Hungarian opposition opinion had long been that only an insider with some "atomic bomb" (some secret information that could lead to prosecutions etc) can change things. So this post drew a lot of eyeballs and he got invited to the largest leftist political YouTube channel for an interview which quickly reached a million views (which is a lot in Hungary with 9.5 million population). In the interview he painted a picture of a morally bankrupt Fidesz who only cares about enriching their inner circles, filling up all positions with incompetent loyalists and causing the country to become poorest in the EU. He accused Fidesz of abandoning their original western-oriented civic principles and said that it is Fidesz who changed and not him. He even told details about how the government tried to interfere in his marriage and divorce. This viral interview was conveniently just a few weeks before the March 15 national public holiday (celebrating the 1848 revolution against the Habsburgs, which was defeated jointly by Habsburg Austria and tsarist Russia.), and he held a public speech in front of tens of thousands, announcing a new movement.
Conveniently again, the 2024 elections for the European Parliament were just about 3 months away. This allowed Péter Magyar to do a campaign with real stakes very early and test the amount of support for real, instead of just through surveys. In this campaign he actually toured the countryside. Lately, there had been quite a split between richer, more educated, urban people (who are against Fidesz) and the poorer, less educated, rural population (who are pro-Fidesz). That hadn't always been the case, the capital used to have some civic-conservative, educated patriotic intellectual strongholds especially areas with villas in the hills of Buda, the sort of people who prided themselves on reading Hungarian national poetry, going to the theater, etc. And traditionally, before the Orbán era, poor countryside people used to vote Socialist, because of nostalgia for the old system when everyone had a job and so on.
The point is, by 2024, Fidesz already lost even those previously culturally right wing rich districts and has gone all-in on the countryside, but those areas had proved very hard for previous opposition parties to reach. Péter Magyar, however, is from this civic right-wing milieu. His parents had conservative intellectual backgrounds, one side Catholic, the other Calvinist. His godfather was Ferec Mádl, respected conservative legal scholar, former president of the republic and former minister of education in the first (conservative) government after the fall of the iron curtain. So Magyar knows the symbols and spefaks the language, and uses national symbols, national clothes, songs and so on. With this campaign, his 2-3-months-old movement got 30% of the EU election votes, compared to 45% for Fidesz. Once he got the status of member of European Parliament, he was able to enter state institutions like hospitals. He made a campaign out of visiting rural hospitals and documenting their bad conditions on social media, contrasting it with the opulent lifestyle of the oligarchs and politicians, their private jets, yachts etc. He leaked conversations he recorded with his ex-wife the then justice minister Judit Varga, where she admitted that another another minister interfered with a case at the public prosecutors office, removing things from documents in a corruption scandal, in which another cabinet member is also involved.
The government media found no good antidote to him. His ex-wife, the ex-minister Judit Varga reacted with accusations of domestic abuse and that she just said what he wanted to hear to avoid abuse by him. This was never proved beyond he said she said. There was another attack surface, where Magyar went to party in a club and someone was recording a video of him and they got into an altercation, at the end of which Magyar took the guy's phone and threw it in the Danube river. The police then sent divers to retrieve the phone from the bottom of the river... These are the kinds of stories in this campaign. Or when the pro-government media tried to "attack" him that in the EU parliament, while waiting for his turn to speak, he had his hand in his pocket and was adjusting his penis, or that the shape of his large penis is sometimes seen in his tight pants on some of his photos. This was a literal news segment in the real evening news of the channel TV2. He responded with banana and sausage jokes on social media.
He has also capitalized on several other domestic scandals, like how the son of the chairman of the National Bank of Hungary embezzled about 2 billion EUR. Or how Orbán is enriching his daughter and son-in-law, and made his childhood school friend the richest man in Hungary. Or how he even keeps zebras on his lands outside his village.
When Trump won the election, Orbán thought he will get back the narrative control, because they were mostly running after Magyar and reacting to him. So Orbán tried to say something big at the start of 2025, and he announced banning the Pride March, and that they will create a "transparency law" that will reveal foreign financing of the pro-opposition media and that this will be a spring cleaning, because "the bedbugs have overwintered", by which he meant "politicians, judges, journalists and fake-civil organizations" who had been bought by Brussels or previously the Biden admin. The goal was to make donations, even from Hungarians, much harder for independent media. Magyar kept himself at arm's length distance from both Pride and the journalists, knowing that the government wants to regain narrative control to their field, to make the national conversation be again about gender, homosexuality, migration etc. In the end Orbán wasn't able to effectively ban Pride. It was officially illegal but drew the largest crowd ever. Going against a peaceful march of hundreds of thousands with police would have been even worse for him than just accepting this. They also paused the whole "Spring cleaning law" idea for now.
Last year Fidesz tried to slander Tisza with a fake, AI-generated 600-page document, which allegedly proves that Tisza is planning to raise taxes and will tax also cats and dogs and so on.
Another big scandal was around a Samsung battery factory in Hungary, where tests revealed that some workers had over 500% above the limit of certain toxic compounds in their blood and the whole facility was constantly failing inspections and had to pay the maximum fine several times, though the maximum was incredibly low (around 25k EUR). Journalists have uncovered that the government knew about this and ordered the intelligence agencies to surveil the plant and the leadership to understand better what is going on. This revealed even more irregularities than was reported by Samsung through official channels. According to the journalists, the cabinet was split on whether to close the plant or not, as they saw a huge scandal potential in it, but the foreign minister argued that closing down the Samsung plant would cause panic in the steeply rising battery and electric vehicle industry in Hungary, such as the Chinese CATL and BYD factories.
Later this year another huge scandal was revealed about a secret Hungarian intelligence agency action against Magyar's Tisza party back in 2024. The topic is quite complex and is like a Netflix crime show with plot twists and turns. The main gist is that it is suspected that state intelligence agencies or perhaps in part some gray-zone private intelligence groups tried to get a 19-year-old IT administrator of the Tisza party to work for them, leak system information, break the IT systems and cause disruptions and data leaks. The IT admin strung them along for some time, but when the unknown people realized the admin is leaking info to Magyar about them and is preparing to gather information about them, they tried to shut down the operation by sending the police on the IT guy with accusations of child pornography. The big narrative moment came this year when the leader of this police investigator group, for child pornography cases, stepped to the public in a 90-minute video explaining the case and how they received "tips" from the Constitution Protection Office to treat this report seriously (the report was submitted through public channels) and that they should seize all data storage media of the IT admins. The police captain and his group found zero trace of child pornography in the storage media, but they found out that they help the Tisza party with IT and found screenshots of chat messages with this mysterious party who was trying to get the admins to mess with the IT system. The government reacted to the scandal by releasing footage from the IT admin's informal hearing at the Constitution Protection Office, where he allegedly admits to having been in contact with Ukrainian spies, and the government tried to connect Tisza to Ukraine with this again. Later, also the IT guy stepped up and gave an interview as well. Both the police captain and the IT guy are now opposition heroes in the folklore. The police captain got about 800k EUR in donations over just a few days, since he was fired and prosecuted for the whistleblowing. The IT guy was signing large photos of him to people standing in line in campaign rallies.
A few days later, a military officer stepped up to reveal insider knowledge about how Orbán's own son (Gáspár Orbán has has one of the best Wikipedia taglines with "Hungarian lawyer, soldier, religious leader and former professional footballer"), who allegedly "found Jesus" in Africa, thought up a military mission to the country of Chad, and was counting with possibly up to 50% loss of life of the Hungarian soldiers sent to Chad (the plan was 200 soldiers). The law had been passed through parliament but the mission didn't start due to changing situations in Chad.
Meanwhile the attempts to re-gain narrative control by Fidesz haven't been effective. One news item and then propaganda fodder was where Hungary stopped a regularly scheduled and announced cash transfer between Austria and Ukraine, carrying 35 million EUR and 9 kg of gold. The counter terrorism police pointed guns at the van, and seized it all. Then the government media story was all about money laundering and that the money was possibly actually for the Tisza party etc. It doesn't have to add up logically, but the images create a demonstration of strength against Ukraine and look good on social media.
During this years March 15 celebrations, Fidesz paid some people to hold up a large Ukrainian flag at the rally of Tisza party, the pictures went through the entire government-aligned media empire, claiming that this party rallied under Ukrainian flag instead of the Hungarian flag. Since there was phone camera footage about this provocation, people managed to find selfies of those people who held up the flag together with Fidesz officials.
One could of course discuss each of these cases in much more detail. And I didn't even mention the leaked phone calls between FM Szijjarto and Lavrov. I just wanted to give a glimpse of the sort of topics that were most active in the campaign season. These are not typical culture war issues. So when you see a landslide defeat of Orban tomorrow, don't think that it means that Hungarians suddenly want wokeness. It's mainly about the state of the economy, corruption, and a good story that people could follow along from the beginnings two years ago to now unseating Orbán.
But why do the leftists and progressives go along with a former Fidesz-member being the one to defeat Orbán? Because the previous opposition imploded in 2022. Half of them were backstabbing each other, the other half had been already bought by Fidesz. Prominent pre-2010 leftist politicians were always in the opposition multi-party groups that ran together in prior elections, and those people got so discredited that they were never able to win. It had to be someone different.
It's also worth mentioning that Péter Magyar has a charismatic personality and good, fashionable appearance. He's about as old as Orbán was back in 2010 when he started his 16-year rule. By now Orbán looks old, and obese, and aesthetics matter. Orbán never got acquainted with social media and tech, while Magyar manages to use social media without becoming cringe fellowkids poster, and he's treated like a rockstar in his multiple-per-day campaign rallies by everyone, including young people and young women. It's perhaps also interesting to note that there is basically no political gender gap in Hungary right now. Men were faster to start supporting Tisza, but by now it's basically equal. The real gap is in educational attainment and villages vs towns and cities.
What will Magyar's governing look like? We don't really know. The supporters are very heterogeneous, and likely only agree on the fundamentals. There will be a new constitution if Tisza wins a supermajority and they will replace many Orbán puppets in high positions, including in courts. Who will come instead, we don't exactly know. There will be a new, more proportional electoral law that doesn't give 2/3 supermajorities so easily and doesn't punish smaller parties as much, such that the incentive to form electoral coalitions is smaller. The idea is that they should introduce a more pluralist political system where there will be more kinds of parties in the 2030 election, and people can vote for someone they agree with in more detail. But the current vote is seen by Tisza voters as more of an anti-Orbán vote, and the details will have to be worked out later. But if I had to guess, it will probably be standard technocratic stuff, since their main economy figurehead is the former global vice president of Shell, István Kapitány. I also predict they will be moderate on culture war issues and the focus will be on more about institutions and they will try to prosecute the oligarchs etc.
Hungary is also an interesting sign of how this new "postliberal right" have abandoned the plot on traditional conservatism. One of the main selling points for Fidesz left you'll see from voters is the price controls and price caps that Orban has been putting in. This new breed of "conservatism" is deeply socialist in how they think. So of course Trump, the guy who has been raging against price gouging, threatening companies to not raise prices in response to tariffs and nationalized quite a few corporations thinks Orban is real swell. In the same way it's not a surprise just how well they get along with the Sanders and Mamdani faction of the Dems. They all think the same, evil corporations conspiring against the people. Sanders types might think it's to "oppress the poor" and Trump/Orban types might think it's to "make him look bad" or whatever, but the deeper logic is the same.
I don't know if their economic policy became retarded because they were chasing the poor idiot voters or if poor idiot voters started propping them up because they're stupid, but either way it's quite meaningful that future electoral results aren't looking good for the postliberal right. It's not enough to just screech about prices and try to brute force it, you have to deliver results. And that means embracing the reality that markets work..
Traditional conservatism ideologically has little interesting to say about the economy. It is true that most conservative parties discovered that supply side economics works in the seventies and eighties, but this was a marriage of convenience- driven largely by the left being socialist(which does not work) at the time.
My understanding based on my very vague knowledge of the relevant history is that in the US, conservatism became entwined with free-market capitalism ideology only around the 1940s, in large part as a reaction to the New Deal and communism. So it is not too surprising that eventually conservatism is becoming partly un-entwined from it.
But I am sure that the real history is much more complex than that.
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See, the thing is that actual traditional conservatism doesn’t necessarily have any strong ideological reason to join itself with pro-business, anti-regulation free market economics. The latter is approximately what Americans call libertarianism, and what Europeans call (classical) liberalism. It’s really a historical contingency that in America, this political strain happened to join forces with the religious right/moral majority/tradcon types from approximately the Reagan era to the Trump era; even then, it was far from a solid Republican voting base (cf. Clinton peeling some of them away with the Third Way, “the end of welfare as we know it”, NAFTA, etc.)
There’s no reason to think this should be a general law of conservative politics; indeed, globally speaking, it tends to be the exception rather than the rule, especially in systems that favor the formation of smaller, focused parties rather than two big amorphous tents. Hell, even within the FPTP Anglosphere, it’s not uncommon to find conservatives, leftists, and classical liberals form 3 entirely separate parties (cf., respectively, Tories, Labour, and LibDems in the UK; Tories, NDP, and Liberals in Canada)
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